Jamal Kahshoggi, a US-based journalist who frequently criticised the Saudi government, was killed while visiting the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, where he was collecting papers for his wedding. Courtesy: POMED/CC by 2.0

By James ReinlUNITED NATIONS, Sep 4 2019 – The United Nations is under growing pressure to scrap an event it is co-hosting with the private foundation of Saudi Arabia’s crown prince Mohammad bin Salman, who has been linked to the killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

On Tuesday, Sunjeev Bery, director of Freedom Forward, became the latest leader of a campaign group to press the U.N. to cancel the Sept. 23 event, saying it would help repair bin Salman’s reputation over the Khashoggi murder.

The event, known as the Misk-OSGEY Youth Forum, is a partnership between the U.N.’s youth envoy, Jayathma Wickramanayake, and the Misk Foundation, a culture and education foundation chaired by bin Salman, who is better known as MBS.

“No one — especially not the U.N. — should be partnering with MBS or his personal Misk Foundation,” Bery told IPS.

“Saudi Arabia’s brutal crown prince is responsible for the deaths of thousands of Yemeni children. His thugs imprisoned leading women’s rights activists and murdered Jamal Khashoggi.”

Kenneth Roth, the director of Human Rights Watch, a campaign group, last week accused the world body of helping to “whitewash” MBS’s record; Mandeep Tiwana, from Civicus, a rights group, called the event “disturbing”.

The U.N. youth envoy’s office declined to comment on the row. U.N. spokesman Stephane Dujarric said the world body had repeatedly issued “very strong statements … calling for accountability” in Khashoggi’s killing.

The Misk-OSGEY Youth Forum will take place in New York only 10 days before the first anniversary of Khashoggi’s murder on Oct. 2 last year, when Saudi government agents killed and dismembered the journalist inside the country’s consulate in Istanbul.

The CIA later determined that MBS had personally ordered the hit. Saudi officials, who initially said Khashoggi had left the consulate alive, now say the journalist was killed in a rogue operation that did not involve MBS.

Saudi Arabia’s mission to the U.N. did not answer requests for comment from IPS.

The four-hour workshop for 300 young people at the New York Public Library will occur on the sidelines of the U.N. General Assembly and promote green themes, corporate responsibility and other aspects of the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) agenda.

It will feature Alexandra Cousteau, an environmentalist and granddaughter of French explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau; and Bart Houlahan, an entrepreneur who promotes sustainable business practices.

Other speakers include Andrew Corbett, an expert on entrepreneurship at Babson College, Paul Polman, former CEO of consumer goods firm Unilever, and Ann Rosenberg, an author and U.N. technology expert.

Dr. Reem Bint Mansour Al-Saud, a Saudi princess and an envoy to U.N. headquarters in New York, who advocates for empowering women and development in the Gulf kingdom, will also speak at the workshop.

Khashoggi, a United States-based journalist who frequently criticised the Saudi government, was killed while visiting the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, where he was collecting papers for his wedding.

U.N. expert Agnes Callamard issued a report in June that described the assassination as a “deliberate, premeditated execution,” and called for MBS and other Saudi officials to be probed.

The Misk-OSGEY Youth Forum comes after years of tensions between the U.N. and Riyadh over the war in Yemen, where Saudi Arabia is leading a military coalition against the country’s Houthi rebels.

The conflict has killed tens of thousands of people and caused led to a major humanitarian crisis.

“The crown prince and his violent government must be held accountable for their human rights crimes,” said Bery, who advocates for the U.S. to cut ties with Saudi Arabia and other authoritarian regimes.

“Instead, misguided U.N. staff are absurdly giving the crown prince a public relations platform as he attempts to wipe away the blood of so many dead Yemeni children.”

The United Nations headquarters showcasing the Sustainable Development summit, September 2015. The essayist, an expert in governance and democracy, bemoans the growing participation of multinational corporations in UN system forums. Credit: CIA PAK/UN PHOTO

Whether it is in managing the Internet, where the UN’s governing structure offers only an advisory role for governments; or climate change, where the most exciting actions are now corporate-led partnerships outside the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change; or the Gates Foundation-sponsored Gavi, The Vaccine Alliance, which is in a tug of war with the World Health Assembly on who sets health policy in developing countries, the institutional basis for global decision-making is changing.

Where nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) were once the largest nonstate entities attending UN system meetings, transnational corporations have become the biggest players. They participate in well-attended public-private partnership sessions at the UN Conference on Trade and Development, the Human Rights Council and the High-Level Political Forum, the key body for following up on the Sustainable Development Goals.

The latest institutional foray is a World Economic Forum-UN partnership agreement. Under this arrangement, senior UN leaders are invited at national, regional and international levels to interact with forum members, many of whom are actually causing the global problems that the UN system is tasked to fix, such as climate change.

These developments are part of a new global governance approach, one in which a team of corporate executives, leaders of civil society organizations (CSOs) , officials from governments and the UN system, academics and other players take on the governance of a specific international challenge.

In the economic, social and environmental fields, this governance arrangement is called multistakeholderism, as each new global decision-maker is said to represent a “stakeholder” in an issue. In practice, these governance arrangements can have a role equal to or greater than the one held by the intergovernmental body officially assigned to address a universal problem.

These experiments in a new form of global governance and the 2010 report on the Global Redesign Initiative by the World Economic Forum run counter to efforts to enhance a sense of democracy as part of global decision-making.

Corporate executives — not leaders of small- and medium-size enterprises, nor microenterprises — are central to these groups and public-private partnerships. Yet these bodies have their own internal governance and constituencies; as a result, they redraft global principles that were agreed on by governments to meet their own, often business-focused, concerns.

The selected government officials, those considered sympathetic to the goals of multistakeholders, sit on the board as only one of the decision-makers. At the same time, the other players are elevated to a role in global governance without any democratic basis for their participation.

This dynamic is quite different from the one prevalent during the conferences of the 1990s, when civil society organizations, farm and labor organizations, educators, scientists, women and businesses gathered to provide diversified voices to governments, which alone led international decision-making.

UN public-private partnerships tend to worsen changes in the relationship between the intergovernmental process and UN secretariat staff members, who act as the administrative arm of a UN entity.

Where once the secretary-general and the heads of UN specialized agencies and programs saw themselves — and were seen by UN member governments — as governed by a specific intergovernmental body, now the secretariats act more autonomously. They strike up relationships with multiplayer bodies like the World Economic Forum and corporations without intergovernmental oversight.

A result of the increase in institutional ties between the UN and senior corporate executives is that civil society organizations, educators, scientists, women and other social communities have less ability to influence the behavior of the UN bodies and the intergovernmental process.

The weakening tie is driven both by outside factors and internal realities. The pressures on the UN system are significant. There is the cumulative effect, for example, of more than 30 years of flat or negative regular budget growth of the UN.

As an extension of President Trump’s effort to deconstruct the domestic regulatory state in the United States, his administration is also striving to deconstruct the UN system.

Internally, the secretariats perceive that taking relatively autonomous actions is one way to deliver on their generic assignments and to offset the underfunded regular budget by reaching out to potential corporate donors.

This increased autonomy is often reflected in more willingness to accept invitations to join a multistakeholder group to “represent” the UN and governments or to invite major corporations to join a secretariat-led multiparty group. These new links can allow corporations to assert that they are working with the UN — albeit without intergovernmental oversight.

They can also influence a UN secretariat to frame solutions to global problems in ways that are sensitive to their corporate constituency but not necessarily focused on government expectations or the need for leading the world toward systemic reforms.

Of course, the interests of corporations vary. For some consumer-oriented businesses, their increased role in UN operations is a chance to secure a role in creating a global sustainability market for a specific product or service.

For other multinationals, particularly those affiliated with the World Economic Forum, it is an opportunity, after the shocks of the 2008 financial crisis, to re-legitimate the globalized market in the minds of international and national elites.

It does not need to be so. Steps can be taken by governments to reassert leadership in managing globalization and mitigating global environmental crises. These could include a clear definition of conflict of interests to guide secretariats when they partner with a specific enterprise; an intergovernmental review of multistakeholders’ plans to ensure they follow UN goals; and improving intergovernmental oversight of the entire UN system through regular meetings of the heads of all intergovernmental bodies.

With the advent of many players involved in decision-making and international public-private partnerships, the secretariats are increasingly semiautonomous from their intergovernmental body, reaching out to one constituency, the international business community, thus marginalizing their overall roles with other global constituencies.

These developments undermine a public view that democracy — one country-one vote with all of its exceptions — will be the guiding global governance principles today and in the future.